The story begins with the mass murder/suicide of his family by the father of Danielle Burton. Killed were Danielle’s mother and her two siblings – a brother and a sister. Danielle was 9 years old and she recalls her father standing in the doorway of her bedroom, drunk, calling to her, then putting a gun to his head and blowing his brains out.
Twenty-five years later Danielle is a pediatric psych nurse (no surprise there) who is still looking for an answer to the question: why didn’t he kill me? Why did he let me live to tell?
As the 25th anniversary of the murder/suicide approaches, there are back-to-back grisly “family annilihation” events which initially appear to be unrelated. But detective D.D. Warren sees some similarities. Both events – in which 12 people died – appeared to be cases in which the father murdered the family and then committed suicide. But there are forensic problems with that simple conclusion. Both scenes seem to have been staged. And both families had children with severe emotional/mental problems. The common denominator seens to be the psych unit in which Danielle works.
Warren is a bulldog who won’t settle for the simple answers. She keeps digging and starts to interview the staff at the psych unit, including Danielle. And no sooner do the interviews start than a child in the unit dies, apparently by hanging herself. A coincidence? It is the first child death the unit has ever experienced. And it, too, seems to have been staged. Danielle becomes a “person of interest” in the ivestigation. But there are others, too.
There is a strong current of repressed sexuality that runs through this book. Danielle and Warren both are desperately horny. And there are some hunky men who are more than willing to minister to their sexual needs – a hot male detective, a rich faith healer and a big, strong “gym coach” psych ward staff member. The repressed sexuality of Danielle is one of the key elements of the plot. Warren’s horniness is just comic relief.
I didn’t quite buy the motive for the murders, but Gardner is skillful in presenting the stories – both the original murders and the ones 25 years later – and she kept my interest.
I think I have read a D.D. Warren mystery before, but apparently I didn’t blog about it. Must have been before 2011 when I started blogging. But I enjoy the books that feature her.
7 out of 10.